Independence Day: You Can’t Phone Home Again

Roland Emmerich doesn’t follow up his 1996 sci-fi smash so much as copy it—but the blockbuster formula no longer holds.

June 24, 2016

For a movie about aliens attacking
Earth and wiping out the human race, Independence
Day was an awful lot of fun. Released in 1996, a halcyon time in the years before
9/11—when the idea of actual major city landmarks being destroyed was relegated
to fiction—director Roland Emmerich’s paean to global destruction carried a
giddy thrill. Viewers could enjoy a visceral jolt of phony devastation without
having to suffer any of the real-world consequences. A big, dumb popcorn movie
drunk on the escapism that summer blockbuster season provides, Independence Day was the first film I
ever saw in a theater in which fellow attendees brought an inflatable
beach ball to happily punch into the air and pass down the aisles before the
flick began. If this was the end of the world, we were going to make sure it
was a blast.

Independence
Day: Resurgence is a reasonable facsimile of the original: Aliens invade,
havoc is wreaked, the good guys kick ass and save the day. But in lots of
small, important ways, it’s a profoundly different movie, proof that twenty
years of blockbusters have inured us to the original’s innocent pleasures. What
once was giddy is now professionally polished and soullessly crafted. What’s
the point of destroying humanity if you can’t even enjoy it?

Adopting a more mournful tone than
its predecessor, Resurgence quickly
establishes what’s happened to the central characters since the 1996 attack. In
the film’s one really clever conceit, society has advanced rapidly thanks to humanity’s
utilization of the vanquished aliens’ superior technology—in only twenty years,
we’ve established moon bases and high-speed travel on Earth. The nations of the
world now live in harmony, the trauma of nearly being eradicated has inspired them
to put aside their conflicts.

Then it’s back to Emmerich’s boilerplate
heroics. Will Smith, and his character, is missing from this film; we’re told
he has died, and his dutiful son Dylan (Jessie Usher) is trying to fill his
shoes by serving as a fighter pilot, just like his dear old dad. But the real
stand-in for Smith—or, at least, his wiseass energy—is Jake (Liam Hemsworth), a
fellow pilot who had a falling out with Dylan years earlier. Their very minor
conflict is as paper-thin as the love story concerning Jake and his fiancée Patricia
(Maika Monroe), the all-grown-up daughter of former President Thomas Whitmore
(Bill Pullman), who remains traumatized by his battle with the
extraterrestrials.

Nobody goes to an Emmerich film
craving a nuanced plot or layered performances. The delight of his movies is
that they’re user-friendly—less noxiously macho than Michael Bay’s films but also
more shamelessly cartoon-y than a real auteur, like Steven Spielberg. Independence Day was peak Emmerich because
it best harnessed the “God, isn’t this great?!” enthusiasm he had for
larger-than-life spectacle: Smith’s widescreen grin and Jeff Goldblum’s
not-quite-winking turn as a bemused scientist perfectly synched up with their
director’s weightless tone, clueing us in that it was okay to sit back and let
the concentrated tomfoolery wash over you.

In Resurgence, Goldblum still cracks his wry jokes—Brent Spiner and
Judd Hirsch reprise their roles as one-note comic relief—but the original’s
pleasure has mostly been replaced by a formidable competence that won’t inspire
a lot of beach balls in the theater. In part, this is because Resurgence’s
greatest suspense isn’t whether Earthlings will be able to stop a new band of
invading aliens but, rather, how Emmerich can justify revisiting his blockbuster
so many years later.

Resurgence’s greatest suspense isn’t whether Earthlings will be able to stop the invasion, but rather how Emmerich can justify revisiting his blockbuster so many years later.

Many sequels have to elevate the
stakes so a follow-up seems understandable, but with Resurgence, Emmerich is essentially just repeating himself. The
director isn’t merely competing with his 1996 film—he’s squaring off with a
litany of invasion and disaster movies that he and others have made since. It’s
no contest: The alien ships may be bigger and the creatures themselves more
impressively rendered, but the déjà vu of destruction doesn’t do Resurgence any favors. One of the first
film’s strengths was, oddly, its unoriginality: Emmerich didn’t reinvent the
alien-invasion storyline so much as he figured out the most mainstream,
super-sized way of telling it. By comparison, Resurgence is an echo of a rehashed notion, as irrelevant as it is
solidly executed.

Does it matter that the new film
comes out in a post-9/11 world, one where it doesn’t take much imagination to
envision a peaceful city ripped to shreds or buildings reduced to rubble? Where
other contemporary blockbusters try to ennoble their scenes of carnage by
introducing an air of dignified shock and solemnity, Resurgence blithely ignores the real-world parallels. Lots of
characters self-sacrifice for the greater good—and others’ deaths are meant to
be motivating factors for our haunted protagonists—but it all just glides right
past.

This might be tact on Emmerich’s
part—the director understands his movie’s role as harmless entertainment—but one
suspects that it’s more likely a sign that he doesn’t want to mess with a
sure-shot formula for a movie that needs to be a big hit. Emmerich’s last real commercial
success was 2012, which came out
seven years ago, an eternity for a blockbuster filmmaker, and Resurgence feels self-consciously fashioned
to serve an audience its director hopes is still out there. This film isn’t a
resurgence—it’s a retrenchment. Why wait 20 years to prove you can make your best
film all over again, but without the sparkle that made it so special in the
first place?

Grade: C+

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